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The fossil testacea of the faluns of the Loire imply, according to the late Edward Forbes, that the beds were formed partly on the shore itself at the level of low water, and partly at very moderate depths, not exceeding ten fathoms below that level. The molluscan fauna is, on the whole, much more littoral than that of the Pliocene Red and Coralline Crag of Suffolk, and implies a shallower sea.
Its width in the middle and southern states is very commonly from 100 to 150 miles. It consists, in the South, as in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, almost exclusively of Eocene deposits; but in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, more modern strata predominate, of the age of the English Crag and faluns of Touraine. Fulgur canaliculatus. Fusus quadricostatus, Say.
These proofs of a more elevated temperature seem to imply the higher antiquity of the faluns as compared with the Suffolk Crag, and are in perfect accordance with the fact of the smaller proportion of testacea of recent species found in the faluns.
The two others are fresh-water, the upper of which may be also grouped with the faluns, while the lower must be referred to the Lower Miocene, as defined in the next chapter.
Some of the genera occurring fossil in Touraine, as the corals Astrea and Dendrophyllia, and the bryozoan Lunulites, have not been found in European seas north of the Mediterranean; nevertheless, the zoantharia of the faluns do not seem to indicate, on the whole, so warm a climate as would be inferred from the shells.
Professor Beyrich confines the term "Miocene" to those strata which agree in age with the faluns of Touraine, and he has proposed the term "Oligocene" for those older formations called Lower Miocene in this work. In the hills of which the Superga forms a part there is a great series of Tertiary strata which pass downward into the Lower Miocene.
The term "faluns" is given provincially by French agriculturists to shelly sand and marl spread over the land in Touraine, just as similar shelly deposits were formerly much used in Suffolk to fertilise the soil, before the coprolitic or phosphatic nodules came into use.
Arctic Miocene Flora. Disco Island. Lower Miocene of United States. Fossils of Nebraska. The marine faluns of the valley of the Loire have been already described as resting in some places on a fresh-water tertiary limestone, fragments of which have been broken off and rolled on the shores and in the bed of the Miocene sea.
A large number of the 290 species are common to all the localities, those peculiar to each not being more numerous than we might expect to find in different bays of the same sea. The total number of species of testaceous mollusca from the faluns in my possession is 302, of which forty-five only, or fourteen per cent, were found by Mr. Wood to be common to the Suffolk Crag.
Among many univalves agreeing with those of Africa on the eastern side of the Atlantic are Cypraea sanguinolenta, Buccinum lyratum, and Oliva flammulata. Amphistegina Hauerina, d'Orbigny. M. Alcide d'Orbigny has shown that the foraminifera of the Vienna basin differ alike from the Eocene and Pliocene species, and agree with those of the faluns, so far as the latter are known.
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